The Story of The Bible | The Bible For Grown-Ups

Hello everyone and welcome today to Trinity Sermons.

We at Trinity are starting a new sermon series and we are calling it The Bible for Grown-Ups.

I love the idea of this series and we are really excited to share this first sermon

with you.

In the sermon today, Rob Herkman's will be exploring with us the story of the Bible.

I hope you learn something new from this teaching and that you enjoy the message.

God bless.

So today we are starting something new.

We're starting a new teaching series here at Trinity and we are calling it The Bible

for Grown-Ups.

We are going to be spending four or five weeks on this topic and we are going to be looking

at the Bible, what it is, how to read it and those kind of things.

But I was actually struggling trying to figure out what is the right place to start.

Where do we start a conversation where we are trying to talk a bit about the Bible?

I came across a quote from a pastor in the United States, his name is Andy Stanley.

He said something that I thought actually really resonated with me and I thought, okay, that's

where we got to get started.

He said this.

He said, if you don't know the story of the Bible, then it's actually really hard to believe

the stories in the Bible.

I thought, yes, I think he's right.

Because I think, well, almost all of us know some stories from the Bible.

We know the story of creation or David and Goliath or the story of the prodigal son or

something like that.

We know Bible stories.

Very few of us actually know the story of the Bible.

As in, where did the Bible come from anyways?

And because most of us were introduced to the Bible as children, I don't think we ever really

thought this through very much.

Because let's think about it.

If you go to a Bible to a child, do you really need to explain to them where this Bible came

from and how it was kind of put together?

Probably not.

What you're more interested in is passing on to them the stories, the stories in the

Bible.

But that's okay when you're a child.

But when you grow up, that's no longer the case.

And as adults, we actually really do need to understand where the Bible came from.

Because if you don't know the story of the Bible, then it becomes really hard to believe

the stories in the Bible.

And many people have walked away from their faith.

And maybe you know someone.

Maybe you are someone who has considered or is considering walking away from the faith

because you're just like, I don't think I can really believe these stories.

And maybe one of the reasons we can't believe the stories in the Bible, again, is because

we don't really know the story of the Bible.

When most of us received our Bibles, we received it as a finished product, if you will.

It was already in a big book.

It was bound with leather, had gold writing on top of it.

And maybe the words of Jesus were all nicely in red.

That's how we received the Bible.

It's really important that we understand that that is not how history gave us the Bible.

And that is not how the world received the Bible with chapters and verses and an index

in the front and maps at the back.

By the way, this is my very first Bible that I received when I was probably just about

12 or 13 years old.

It was on November 13th, 1988.

Still has the date there.

And I got it on the occasion of my confirmation when I was confirmed.

It was given to me by my church at the time, which is our family church we grew up in called

St. John the Divine in Cayuga.

It's a good old King James version of the Bible.

Definitely imitation letter though.

It's all like plasticky and cracky.

But I remember being taught, being given this Bible and saying something to the effect.

This is God's Word.

Everything in it is true.

Live your life by it.

Try to read it.

Try to read it every day.

And that's how I received my Bible.

Maybe you received a Bible like this too at one point in your life.

Or maybe you were never given a Bible.

My point is simply this.

Many of us formulated our ideas of what the Bible is when we were children and not when

we were grown up.

And we didn't formulate our idea of what the Bible was based on what we read in the Bible

because let's be honest, most people do not read the Bible.

And even statistics would tell us most people, even many Christians, most Christians do

not really read the Bible.

So what we believe about the Bible is often something we've inherited when we were much,

much younger and we carried that with us into childhood and into adolescence and on into

adulthood.

And for some of us, you know, some of us, we were kind of told when we were young, we

were told, hey, if the Bible says it, then I believe it and that settles it.

And there could be people here today and they say, actually, I still do believe that about

the Bible.

We're not going to slam that at all because that's kind of what we were taught as children.

And many people still believe that as adults.

And that's not wrong.

But there are other people who actually at some point in our life, somebody said something

to us or showed us something in the Bible that we didn't know was there, something we

were frankly embarrassed to find out was in there.

These were the stories that mom and dad never read us at bedtime.

These were the stories in the Bible that the Sunday School teacher seemed to conveniently

skip over.

And we discovered this stuff and we had a real hard time reconciling our belief about the

Bible with this stuff that was in the Bible.

And because you couldn't just look the other way, a lot of people just walked the other

way.

So I can't believe a book like that.

I actually remember very clearly when I was about in grade 10, I was in the basement of

my friend, Emily's house, and there was a bunch of friends that were over.

We were just hanging out.

We were pretty good kids.

And then what I remember sitting down on the, sitting cross legged on the floor with a few

other friends that I remember I told them, I said, I believe the Bible.

And they were like pretty shocked.

And I was shocked that they didn't believe the Bible.

And then they said, well, Rob, what about this?

And what about that?

And they asked me some tough questions about the Bible that I didn't know the answers to.

And they raised some serious concerns and problems with the Bible that these were problems

and concerns that I had never even thought about or put much time into.

Because again, I had just kind of been given the Bible as a kid.

I never really, really read it in that sense and really understood it.

And it made me question my faith.

I remember driving home that night thinking, having a bit of a crisis in my faith, like,

what is this book after all?

I had never stopped to really ask the question, where did this book even come from?

What am I reading here?

I knew some stories, but I didn't know the story of this book itself.

So today we're starting this new teaching series.

We're calling it the Bible for grownups.

And yeah, we're going to look at some stories in the Bible over the next few weeks, for

sure.

Pardon me.

But what we really need to do is start and say, let's look at the Bible itself.

And what we're going to discover is the Bible did not come to us like this, but rather,

the Bible came to us like this, and this, and this, and this, and there was this, and

then there was this, and there was these as well.

Oh, and this, this too.

That's how the Bible actually came to us.

Let me explain what I mean.

You're probably the best way to explain what I mean is to start by telling you the story

of a guy named Luke.

You see, Luke was a first century doctor, and he had kind of a rich friend.

His friend's name was Theophilus.

And Theophilus, like many people in the first century, had heard the stories of Jesus, heard

eyewitnesses talk about Jesus, maybe even talk to people who had met or encountered Jesus,

and as a result, Theophilus, his friend, had become a follower of Jesus.

And he asked Luke, he said, hey, Luke, would you do me a solid?

And would you sit down and write out for me just one big document about the events of

the life of Jesus?

I'll pay you for it.

He probably paid him for it, I think.

And I want, all I know is a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but I want to know

the whole story.

I want an orderly account of who Jesus was.

And so Luke decided, sure, and for his wealthy friend, he sat down and he began to write an

orderly account of the story of Jesus.

And this is how his notes started.

If you open up your Bible and looked in Luke 1.1, this is how it starts.

It says, many have undertaken to draw up an account, or many have undertaken to document

the things that happened among us.

What an opening line.

Notice two things.

First of all, something had happened, right?

And secondly, many people had undertaken to document this thing that had happened.

Now that alone is interesting.

There are very few examples in antiquity of one person's life being documented by multiple

authors or multiple document writers.

Because in those days, it was very expensive, actually, to write something down.

And a lot of people were illiterate anyways.

So it's almost unheard of to know that many people were attempting to draw up an account

of this thing.

What was the thing that had happened?

And what that means is, because many people had undertaken this, there were different

accounts swirling around.

There was somebody who had written one over here, and somebody was writing some accounts

way over here.

And way up in the north, somebody else had some recollections of Jesus' day, too, were

writing down.

But the question is, why did so many people decide they were going to write this down?

Something had happened.

What had happened?

Was it that Jesus had been a great teacher, and that was worth multiple people documenting?

No, that's not enough to justify multiple people documenting a person's life.

Well, maybe it was because he was a miracle worker.

No, that's not the reason why they all decided they had to write it down.

What about maybe the fact that he was killed, he was crucified?

No, what about the fact that he was buried?

No, that happened every day, every week.

That's not worth documenting.

But Jesus rising from the dead, that event is the thing.

That is the thing that happened that made the whole story of Jesus worth writing down.

If Jesus had not risen from the dead, then all that would have happened would have been

a bunch of heartbroken friends gathered around the tomb and maybe scared for their own lives.

And maybe years later, there would have been a footnote about Jesus in some ancient history

book about being a great teacher.

But there would be no Christians, there would be no church, and there would definitely be

no Bible as we understand the Bible.

So Luke documented, and many people documented Jesus' life because his life did not end on

a Roman cross.

It was his rising from the dead that made his life worth documenting.

That is so important.

Now as we continue to read in Luke's Gospel, we read, he says, with this in mind, since

I've investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account

of this account and most excellent Theophilus.

And of course, that's one of the reasons why people think Theophilus was a rich and successful

member of the communities because he's called most excellent Theophilus in this letter.

Now can I just pause for a second?

When Luke started writing this down, did Luke think he was writing the Bible?

The answer to that question is absolutely not.

Luke did not think he was writing the Bible.

Luke did not think he was writing Scripture.

Luke had no idea that no clue could never have fathomed that what he was writing would

somehow have ended up in our Bible some 2000 years later.

Luke was simply writing this, an orderly account, an orderly account of what had happened based

on the eyewitnesses that he had talked to and interviewed.

So if you opened up Luke's orderly account and you were to start reading it, you'd say,

oh, he's got something in here about the birth of Jesus.

Oh, he's got something in here about Jesus teaching.

And oh, Luke also wrote some stuff about Jesus, miracles and the signs he performed.

And then, oh, yes, there is this bit about his arrest and his crucifixion and his burial

and, oh, his resurrection from the dead.

So Luke was just documenting that.

He was not writing the Bible.

And the thing is, Luke also, he knew a bunch of people who were firsthand that would have

known this stuff.

Luke would have known John, I believe.

Luke would have known Peter.

Luke would have been able to talk to James, the brother of Jesus.

Imagine talking to the brother of Jesus.

And that's what Luke did.

He went around and he talked to people and he began to write things down in his little

book.

And then, actually, he kept going because he then eventually met up with the apostle Paul.

The apostle Paul, of course, was going around the Mediterranean area and planting little

churches here and there.

And Luke traveled with Paul.

And so, actually, Luke ended up writing a second kind of book that was called The Book

of Acts.

And in that book, he talks about how the church kind of began and how the followers of Jesus

started sharing the good news and started preaching sermons and they got arrested, but they kept

telling others.

And so, anyway, Luke ends up putting together these documents, these documents which we

can call Luke Acts.

Okay, Luke Acts.

But I just want us to remember again.

Just to remember this, that Luke says, I'm not the only one.

I'm not the only one that is doing this, right?

There are other people.

There's somebody over here doing it.

And somebody over there is doing it.

And someone years ago already did it over there.

The things that have happened to us, the things that have happened to us, people are writing

it down.

I just want to just take a little moment here.

And maybe you need to just ask yourself this question.

Maybe you're one of those people who are kind of on the fence about your faith.

And you need to ask yourself about that first word, many.

Why did so many?

Why did so many people think that this needed to be written down?

Why so many people when it was so expensive and literacy was so high?

It's because something extraordinary had happened.

So again, Luke's over here.

He's writing his stuff.

He's not writing the Bible.

He's just writing his stuff.

And then let's take a look over here.

Over here, though, meanwhile, or actually maybe even before Luke started writing, actually

definitely before Luke started writing, Peter, the disciple of Jesus, is also putting something

down on paper.

Actually, he's not putting it down on paper because most people think Peter was illiterate.

So he was dictating his recollections of Jesus to a guy by the name of John Mark.

There's a second century theologian kind of church leader named Papias who tells us that

Peter dictated the words of Mark's gospel.

Only then it wasn't called Mark's gospel.

It would have just been Peter's recollections of the life of Jesus.

We now call it Mark's gospel.

If you were to read Peter's recollections, you'll find that it's much shorter than Luke's

recollection.

It moves a lot faster than his.

And it was probably written in the 50s, like 20 years after the death and resurrection of

Jesus.

So you've got Peter over here talking to John Mark.

And then you've got another fellow over here.

His name is Matthew.

Matthew is also writing down thoughts about who this Jesus was.

He's doing his own research.

Now Matthew, actually, he's doing it with a different audience in mind.

There was Mark who was Peter who had a very kind of close relationship.

And then you've got Matthew.

Matthew of course is speaking to a Jewish audience.

That's very clear if you read Matthew's recollections.

In fact, you see, there was already a Bible, if you will, kind of what the Jewish people

called the Tanakh.

And it was the sacred writings of the Jewish people that include the Torah, which was Genesis,

Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

And then it included the writings of the prophets and the writings of some history books and

teachings.

And this was already kind of considered sacred by, for sure, considered sacred and holy by

the Jewish community.

And because Matthew was Jewish and was writing to the Jewish community, Matthew, when he

wrote his version of the recollections of Jesus, he was constantly pulling ideas and

thoughts and connections from the Hebrew literature, the Tanakh, and including it into here as

a way of saying, hey, Jesus was the fulfillment of God's plan from the very beginning.

And he was always kind of tying things in and showing how Jesus was like the fulfillment

of prophecies and how we fit right into God's overall story.

In fact, people say that the first version of Matthew's recollections of Jesus was written

in Hebrew, which actually makes sense because his audience would have been a Jewish audience,

and only later did it get translated into Greek.

Are you guys with me?

Are you following with me?

So basically, we've got no Bible.

There's no Bible.

And what we've got is people writing stuff.

Here's a mind-blowing thought.

Consider this.

Mark took Peter's recollections earlier than Luke and Matthew, and most scholars agree

that when Luke was writing his recollections, he already had a copy of Mark on his desk.

And when Matthew was writing his recollections, he had a copy of Mark, or at least parts of

Mark, already with him.

Isn't that kind of mind-blowing?

Wait a second.

That's not how I learned about the Bible, but that's how it came together.

You've got to understand the story of the Bible.

Meanwhile, we've got somebody else who is traveling around and not writing documents and recollections,

per se, but writing letters.

You've got the apostle Paul, who is...

Where are my Pauls?

Here they are.

Paul is going around planting churches, and he's not writing the Bible.

What he's doing is writing letters.

He's writing a letter to the church in Philippi.

He's writing a letter to the church in Thessalonica.

He's writing a letter to the church in Ephesus.

He's writing a letter to the church in Galatia, and another one to the church in Rome, and

he's writing all these letters to them.

Again, it's not Scripture.

It's letters.

And it's not just Paul who was writing letters, but there were some other letters that were

getting written by Peter.

And there was another...

There was a letter or two that...

Or definitely one letter written by James.

They weren't writing the Bible.

They were just writing letters.

Let me...

Let's talk about one very important one.

There was a guy named John who said, I too am going to put down my memories and my recollections

of Jesus so that people and generations can hear all about it.

And people might say, well, John, come on.

Look, we've already got this.

We've already got this.

These guys are working on theirs.

They're borrowing from him.

The word is getting around.

Why do you need to put down anything more?

And I think, actually, John tells us.

He tells us in his document why he felt it was important for him to write something more.

And this is what he says right at the end.

If you were to read John's recollections of Jesus, he says that Jesus performed many other

signs.

Oh, I couldn't even get them all in here.

In other words, John is saying that I only put certain things in here.

I didn't put them all in here.

And he performed these signs in the presence of his disciples, not just the 12, but, you

know, hundreds of people saw these that they're not recorded in this book.

What book is he talking about?

Is he talking about this book?

No, this book did not exist.

He's talking about this book, his own writing.

He says, I didn't put them in here, but I have put some in here.

And then he goes to tell us why he chose to put something in here.

He says, these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son

of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name.

This is a fascinating thing.

He's basically saying, I didn't put everything in here, but what I did put in here is enough

that if you just had this and you didn't have any of that, you could still believe that

Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and you could have life in his name.

Thanks, John, which is actually why when many people start reading the Bible, we don't recommend

they start at Genesis.

We don't even recommend they start at Matthew.

We recommend they start reading the Gospel of John.

Why?

John has written his Gospel according to his own words in such a way that if you were to

just read this, you could come to know the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ.

This is pretty crazy.

All these books, all the, they're not books, all these documents that are being written.

Now let's fast forward a bit.

I know I'm kind of going a little all over the place here today, but let's get to the

end of the first century.

The end of the first century, it's still no Bible, but we have all these documents that

are floating, floating, floating around.

And actually what we do have is a number of Christians that are growing and growing too.

Now there's more Christians that, you know, there's Greek Christians, and Roman Christians,

and there's Christians in different parts of the world.

And what begins to happen is copies.

Copies start to get made.

So, you know, Luke wrote his document, but eventually somebody said, oh, I want to copy

that down.

Thanks.

I'm going to take a copy and I'm going to take it over to this community here.

So they've got a copy of it.

And then Paul's letter said, oh, that's a really interesting thing Paul said in his

letter.

It almost feels inspired.

So they said, can we have a copy of that?

So they took a copy of Paul's letter and they made a copy of that and somebody made a copy

of that and there's copies and copies and copies start to proliferate.

Soon there's dozens, then there's hundreds, then there's thousands of copies, not of

the Bible.

There's thousands of copies of these documents floating all around.

And in some towns, they're really fortunate.

They've got like a copy, a full copy of Luke and a full copy of Mark and they've got a

couple of Paul's letters.

They're doing really good.

In other towns, they may just have one letter or they may just have a fragment, a piece

of one of the Gospels that is so, so precious to them.

So some have lots, some have little, right?

And they're so valuable.

Can you imagine if, let's say your grandpa had told you, hey, when I was your age, I

actually heard Peter, I heard Peter preach and it was amazing.

And then one day, somebody comes to town and they have Mark's Gospel, which is Peter's

recollections penned by Mark and you can now have an actual copy of Peter's words.

It's a pretty incredible thing.

Now, this is a pretty poor example, but when in my family, I had a great grandfather and

that's him right there.

His name was Herbert Henry Cawking and he apparently was kind of an amateur poet.

He liked to write down poetry and was always reaming off a limb record or something like

that.

And I never knew him, but of course I knew my grandfather, his son, and my grandfather

was often, you know, he was also a bit of a word smith.

He was always saying something funny and a little turn of a phrase, a little poem, this

a poem, that and maybe some of the things my grandpa was sharing were actually from Herbert

Henry Cawking's kind of more formal poetry.

Anyways, one day my uncle John said, we really should go around and collect all the poetry

that my great grandfather, Herbert Henry Cawking, actually wrote down.

And so that's exactly what he did.

He put together this little book and he gave it to every member of our family and it was

called, The Palms from the Past, the original works of Herbert Henry Cawking.

And I got to be honest with you, these poems aren't like amazing.

But you know, chat GPT could probably do as good as this these days, but here I'll read

one to you.

The village homes of England how peacefully they lay, the ivy holds the crumbling walls

from falling clean away.

The pigsties and the roses give the air a hybrid scent and everything is coming down,

of course, except the rent.

Yeah, it's a, maybe it's kind of true even today.

It's not scripture for sure, but it was very special to hold in your hands something that

was kind of a collection of writings that you thought might have been lost over time.

That's kind of what was happening with the documents concerning Jesus.

And as they were copied and shared, something else began to happen.

People began to feel like these are actually inspired somehow.

These books, these documents, these letters, there's a sacredness to them.

It's almost as if God is speaking to us through letters that were never intended to us, that

God is speaking to us, even though Luke wrote to theophilus, that document actually speaks

to us today.

So there was the sense that these words are special.

These words are inspired.

Now I'm going to round out and end here shortly, but the Roman Empire had a problem with Christians

and Christians didn't believe in Roman gods.

And actually Roman Empire was fine.

If you wanted to worship Jesus or worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you could

do that.

But you also had to worship the emperor, you also had to worship the Roman gods.

And Christians, of course, wouldn't do that.

And so that got them on the wrong side of Roman authorities.

And whenever something went wrong, then Christians kind of got blamed for it and they were often

persecuted for it.

But things went really bad when in the year 303, Emperor Diocletian launched what was

one of the most formidable attacks on Christianity, state-sponsored persecution.

And what it amounted to was this, he wrote an edict.

And in the edict it said that every house of Christian worship had to be destroyed.

It said that every assembly of Christians was illegal.

All the bishops of the church had to be rounded up and they had to recant.

They had to deny their faith.

And on top of that, guess what he said.

You also, if you were caught carrying Christian literature, then you too would be killed.

You and your whole family with you, all Christian literature, all this stuff was to be destroyed.

And so you know what?

Hundreds and hundreds of Christians risked their lives to protect and save not the Bible,

but to protect and save copies and bundles and fragments of these pieces of John's Gospel

and pieces of Paul's letters and pieces of Luke's Gospel.

And they would rather have died than give up these sacred texts.

And the only reason that these documents survived like the second, third and fourth centuries

was because of the sacrificial commitment of Christians to protecting these documents.

Now of course things in politics change.

And in the year 324, Constantine became the undisputed emperor of the Roman Empire.

And what he did was he canceled those edicts.

He said, okay, Christians, you don't have to hide anymore.

You can worship freely.

In fact, Christianity became the religion of preference in the new empire.

And that meant, can you believe this?

That meant that for the first time ever, Christians and Christian scholars were able to come out

of hiding and for the first time say, okay, wait a second, wait.

We've got this.

And we've got this.

And there's this and this and hey, this is safe.

We're able to do this now.

We've got these.

And we, of course, we can't forget that.

And this, everybody seems to have a copy of this by now.

And then they said, oh, oh, and you know what?

Of course, we, the Tanakh, we have to include that too.

And what they ended up doing for the very first time was gathering up all those documents

and all those fragments and all those pieces.

And they put it all together and they, they stacked it.

And for the very first time in history, there was something we could call a Christian Bible,

a Bible.

Pretty amazing, that story.

And let's just go back to the very first thing that I said there.

If you don't know the story of the Bible, it is really hard to believe the stories in

the Bible.

But once you know, once you know the story of the Bible and how it was created and the

events that led to its creation and the, the sacrifice that it took to bring it to us,

then you know what?

It's actually a lot easier to believe the stories in the Bible and to make those stories

our own stories too.

I'm going to end it there today, but that's just a setup for where we're going to be going

in the weeks ahead as we dig deeper and deeper into this amazing book, this amazing document

of the Bible.

So thanks be to God.

Amen.

Thank you so much for joining us today, and we hope that you found the sermon informative

and inspiring.

Join us next week as we continue to learn more about the Bible for grown-ups.

Today's sermon was taken from the April 7th, 2024 service at Trinity Church Streetsville

in Mississauga, Ontario.